BOOKS OF THE TIMES; The Fugitive Kind: A Radical Uninnocent Abroad

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: October 12, 2004

The Darling
By Russell Banks
392 pages. HarperCollins. $25.95.

The possibility of new beginnings, of making a fresh start with a tabula rasa: for so many of Russell Banks's characters, from Bob Dubois in the novelist's 1985 masterwork ''Continental Drift'' through Earl Painter in ''Success Stories'' and Wade Whitehouse in ''Affliction,'' this is the essence of the American dream. It is the dream of reinventing the past and exchanging an unsatisfactory reality for something bigger and better and brighter, and it all too often founders on the shoals of these characters' own na?t?r carelessness or simple bad luck.

The narrator of Mr. Banks's gripping but curiously hollow new novel, ''The Darling,'' is another hapless -- and dangerous -- dreamer who believes she can continually remake herself. She goes by several names: Hannah Musgrave, the name her parents gave her; Scout, the name she assumed as a rebellious teenager; Dawn Carrington, the name she adopted during her years as a member of the Weather Underground; and Mrs. Woodrow Sundiata, the name she uses as the cosseted wife of a Liberian cabinet minister.

Hannah is a descendent of Joan Didion's alienated, terminally detached women, who have difficulty making a coherent narrative of their lives, and she is a relative, too, of Graham Greene's quiet but not so innocent Americans and V.S. Naipaul's Western war tourists, who somehow imagine they are exempt from the chaos and violence they witness in their wanderings abroad. Hannah's actions will have terrible repercussions for her family and for her friends, and as Mr. Banks tells it, for the course of history in Liberia.

As he did in ''Cloudsplitter,'' his 1998 novel about the radical abolitionist John Brown, Mr. Banks freely improvises upon history, in this case, the chapter of Liberian history that brought Charles Taylor to power in the 1990's after a long and brutal civil war. Although he gives the reader some excruciating glimpses of Liberian life that are as visceral and harrowing as anything in Mr. Naipaul's portraits of third-world countries in extremis (places where ''the West is packing its boxes, waiting for the helicopters''), Mr. Banks is less interested in that country's tragic history than in its usefulness as a stage set for his story of American idealism and displaced anger run amok.

Mr. Banks wants to use the fictional Hannah, as he used the fictionalized John Brown in ''Cloudsplitter,'' to examine the psychology of radicalism: to try to understand what makes someone susceptible to revolutionary beliefs and willing or eager to subordinate personal relationships to an abstract cause. He wants to explore the arithmetic of means and ends, and to probe the emotional roots of that brand of American hubris that posits the possibility of continually remaking oneself and the world. Because Hannah always remains something of a representative figure, she never becomes a completely palpable individual; there remains about her the whiff of the synthetic, a sense that she is more symbol than human being.

Hannah tells us her story herself, and as she readily acknowledges, she may very well be another one of Mr. Banks's unreliable narrators. In recounting how she and her husband came to know each other, she recalls: ''I told him the story of my life, most of it, a version of it, and he told me his, and in the telling both storytellers came to believe that their stories were true. I'm the person I'm describing, I thought, I really am!'' And yet, she coyly adds: ''I was revealing what I knew of myself to a black African, not a white American, to a Christian, not an atheist, to a conservative government official, a member of the True Whig party, and not to a neo-Marxist fugitive under indictment by her own government for acts of civil disobedience and suspicion of terrorism. I had no choice but to alter, delete, revise and invent whole chapters of my story. Just as, for the same reasons, I am doing here, telling it to you.''

Hannah's motive is to persuade readers not to judge her ''as you would a stranger,'' and to give them ''a sympathetic understanding'' of her three sons, Dillon, William and Paul, who will become known during the civil war as the boy-soldiers Worse-Than-Death, Fly and Demonology. As Hannah tells it, she was not a natural mother; she felt a strange detachment toward her sons from the start and developed more of an emotional connection with the chimpanzees that she worked with at an animal sanctuary.

We learn that her relationships with her husband, her parents and her former lovers were similarly chilly. She was capable of cavalierly leaving them whenever she wanted to move on. And moving on soon became her modus operandi. This is how she went from being the daughter of well-meaning but self-absorbed upper-middle-class liberals (her father was a sort of Dr. Spock, an expert in child rearing; her mother, a very proper suburban housewife) to being a bomb-making member of the Weather Underground. This is how she became a fugitive from the F.B.I. and ended up in Africa. And this is how she came to marry Woodrow Sundiata and make the fateful acquaintance of his colleague Charles Taylor.

Hannah would have us believe that her father saw her only as an example of his child-rearing theories and that her mother saw her as a mirror of her own expectations, and that her unhappy childhood somehow shaped the course of her life. This is hard for the reader to accept. After all, many people have well-intentioned parents who are patronizing or uncommunicative, and most of these people do not become cold-hearted revolutionaries or nihilistic bomb-makers. Clearly Hannah is deluding herself or trying to rationalize her actions, but in any case Mr. Banks never manages to make her explanation of her life remotely plausible or sympathetic.

In the end, Mr. Bank's failure to turn Hannah into a credible individual, combined with his tendency to sanctimoniously italicize the larger meanings of her story, results in a novel that is fundamentally flawed, despite its thrumming narrative drive.